


Ruby Constellations

by kihophoric



Category: Monsta X (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Alternate Universe - Space, Angst, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Jooheon Bingo, M/M, Non-Consensual Kissing, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-03-04 21:11:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18820810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kihophoric/pseuds/kihophoric
Summary: Jooheon's eternal mission is to make humans fall in love with him, leaving a trail of broken hearts behind for his partner to follow.





	Ruby Constellations

**Author's Note:**

> jooheon is an asshole and everyone is in pain. yall have been warned.
> 
> for the "conman" square of the unique AUs jooheon bingo.

Humans had given him many names since the cradle of civilization.

What they couldn’t ever get right was how he went about his job. Shooting arrows, making them fall in love with each other was such an awfully self-absorbed idea of his process. Jooheon shouldn’t have expected any different from the most egotistical creatures in the universe.

No, he wasn’t making humans fall in love with each other.

He was making them fall in love with _him_.

 _He_ was the love interest. Every time, for eons and forever. Across multitudes of people as he donned multitudes of faces, wooing his way into their lives and taking the most valuable of their mortal presence before fleeing just as swiftly as he had arrived.

From the heavens, Jooheon took another bite of his sweet, emitting a poof of powdered sugar. He lounged back, happily smacking his lips as he entertained himself with the scene below.

There, down on an empty cobbled street, Shownu’s eyes stood transfixed at the distance just beyond the corner. In denial of his pain engulfing him. Desperately clutching onto the hope that his lover would return, that he would take back those searing words and the venom now coursing through his veins.

His lover was long-gone. And with him, a single shard of Shownu’s heart.

 

 

The open hearts were the easiest. But that also made them rather worthless. Supply and demand, simple enough. And Wonho’s was no different.

Jooheon preferred challenges. The wounded hearts, ones with unyielding shutters tightly bolted in place after violent wear and tear. Now those were expensive. Those took years to break into, and the strongest of those took lifetimes. But it was their worth that enticed Jooheon.

At the moment, he was only in need of pocket change. So he coaxed Wonho towards him, deft and nimble with a slight crook of a finger.

Wonho caught the bait immediately. His type was one with a bottomless appetite for the smallest whispers of love.

Poor Wonho.

Poor endlessly sweet and heart-wrenchingly beautiful Wonho.

So he fell prey to Jooheon all too easily. Hook, line, and sinker.

  


He’d like to think of himself as a teacher. A guide, for the humans to learn how to protect themselves.

And the fact that he was giving away these valuable lessons for free - well, apart from the heart bit, but the lessons were worth so much more - Jooheon considered himself to be quite charitable.

It took eight lifetimes and eight faces to win over Minhyuk.

Jooheon was relentless. With every defeat, he forged on, doubly determined to complete his quest. There’s a tipping point for every human, Jooheon was sure of that. And there was no human whose heart was perfectly guarded, that, too, Jooheon affirmed. They could all do better and this one was no different.

When Minhyuk finally broke, the tiny sliver he allowed for Jooheon to enter through erupted into a chasm. The eruption ripped apart his heart with such energy that a piece punctured Minhyuk’s very soul, binding the reality of inevitable farewells and a cynical distrust for unconditional love into his being for lifetimes to come.

This was one of Jooheon’s most accomplished works as of yet. Elated and giddy with excitement, pride burst through Jooheon’s core. And if gods could cry, he may have shed real tears.

  


The concept of love, especially one related to his line of work, doesn’t necessarily need to be of the romantic kind. After all, that kind of discrimination does injustice to those who can’t or won’t experience that flavor of connection their entire lives. It was the variety in human attraction, the range in how to love, who to love, and how much to love that made Jooheon’s endeavors all the more exhilarating.

No two humans felt the same, and Kihyun was no exception.

Betrayal comes in many forms, but all have that distinct bitter aftertaste. Bile rose up from the pit of Kihyun’s stomach and felt on the back of the tongue to remind him that in some ways, he was the cause of his own pain.

Perhaps if he weren’t so loving, so forgiving, casting a blind eye to his friend’s faults and only mending his wounds in privacy. Perhaps if he had voiced the genuinity of their relationship, of how the other would take and take and take and Kihyun bled himself dry to please him because that’s what friends do, that friends shouldn’t expect anything in return and especially not Kihyun because his desire to be the absolute best for others is greater than his own self-perseverance.

And so Kihyun’s heart shrank into nothingness just as Jooheon’s empty chest swelled.

  


What Jooheon did couldn’t be considered stealing. No, with every human, he kindly requests for their hearts to open, waiting for their approval before he swoops in and does his deed.

Hyungwon is a living witness. Ask him, and he’ll confirm it so, that Jooheon doesn’t steal hearts.

He merely breaks them.

In Hyungwon’s case, Jooheon does so thrice in a single lifetime. The first out of need - Jooheon had expenses to take care of. The second time was out of boredom. And the third, out of personal curiosity to see how far Hyungwon would go.

Jooheon had donned different faces for the trifecta of heartbreaks. Hyungwon was an exceptionally smart human, after all. The human was strategic, analytical, inquisitive, all to Jooheon’s delight as he took on this nearly equal match with interest.

The first heartbreak annoyed Hyungwon. Jooheon took the response to that of a sore loser, but silently commended the good game, nonetheless.

The second time proved the most difficult to break. At this point, the heart was freshly open from the recent wound, but Hyungwon’s sharp, ever-growing mind played his weakness as his strength.

Breaking Hyungwon’s heart twice was harder than Jooheon would like to admit.

Maybe it was because Jooheon was frustrated with himself for the slowness of that second run-through. But the third time became Jooheon’s personal best for a human of that caliber.

Jooheon popped the cork of his finest wine to quell his anger amidst the mortal’s cries of agony.

  


Temper on the job was rather unlike him. Clean, detached, efficient, those were normally the words Jooheon associated with his mark.

It was when the fire didn’t subside for years that it finally dawned on him.

The other god’s presence was imperceptible at first, only revealing hints at the most inopportune of times. Guilt, frustration, shame, jealousy. The emotions took turns festering in Jooheon’s mind, clouding his judgement and forcing his stays on earth to be longer and longer with each mission.

Jooheon was furious.

 

Icy gusts billowed around him as he flew upwards, stubborn to extinguish the spark within him. Unwilling to give in, he ascended to the heavens, collapsing only then.

He came to his bearings moments later to a raging war. His breaths froze into crystalline snowflakes, suspended in midair. His head pounded something awful and awfully familiar. The din was piercing, puncturing through his corporeal body and attempted to probe its way into the lacework of his existence. Taunting him, teasing him, relentlessly.

“Stay away from me,” he spat out with the remaining energy he could muster, his physical body twisting and contorting into nebulas.

“Not a very nice way to greet your old partner,” came the reply. And with that, the voice materialized into being.

Changkyun.

Jooheon’s lesser known, equally as destructive foil. God of broken hearts. Where the former sought to coax out love amongst humans, Changkyun took it a step further, wrecking havoc with the final blow. It was his job to complete what Jooheon would so meticulously set up down in the human world. Together, they taught humans to taste what can be, and then what cannot.

“Why.”

The word was uttered through grit teeth, with it taking every fiber of Jooheon’s life force to remain intact.

Changkyun laughed at that. His voice carried a melodic lilt, and he spoke with the cadence unbecoming of the ruby-eyed god.

“I missed you.”

Such a curious happening, the meeting of these two gods were. Jooheon felt the white-hot, blind pain of abandonment that was empowered by the other’s presence. Meanwhile, the uncontrollable attraction of a lifelong sweetheart enticed Changkyun, courtesy of the god of love. The two atmospheres both attracted and repelled each other, forming a revolving storm cloud encompassing the entirety of the planet.

When Changkyun took a step forward, the latter shrank back into himself. When he raised a hand towards the other’s face, Jooheon attempted to flee, only to be grounded into place by the sheer force of the visiting god.

The finger that grazed Jooheon’s cheek was barely noticeable, the softest of the first snows. Jooheon all but dissolved from the touch. He knew even if he destroyed his body, Changkyun would just as easily render it back into existence. They were immortal, after all. Escape was futile. Jooheon closed his eyes, his thoughts a whirlwind of noise as he attempted to pick out a single word.

“Leave.”

The two had met face-to-face before. Not often. (Not often enough, if you asked Changkyun.) And not a single meeting was initiated by the god of love. Jooheon made sure to move a safe distance away from each human once he made his mark, allowing Changkyun to swoop into their hearts and incinerate the fuel Jooheon had spilled. Emotions the humans would feel boiling up from the inside to consume them alive. Emotions to replace the love tragically taken away. Jooheon wasn’t immune to those emotions on earth, and he wasn’t immune to them now.

“And what will you give me, if I do as you say?”

Changkyun’s palm now cradled Jooheon’s chin. His gravity had fully closed in on the other, leaving Jooheon irrevocably, irrefutably at his mercy. At that, the edge of a smile revealed itself on Changkyun’s face, one worn only by those who had the world in their hands.

It took every drop of Jooheon’s will to move closer to Changkyun. To him, they were like the same sides of a magnet, polar magnets going against the very blueprint of the universe to take up the same physical space. As he neared Changkyun, Jooheon last saw the upturned corner of Changkyun’s mouth rising in smug victory before their lips made contact.

A bolt of lightning shot through Jooheon’s body. Electricity split up every molecule, every atom in him before molding back together again. Jooheon let out a guttural scream, muffled by the other’s lips but not enough so that it could be heard around the world. He staggered backwards within seconds, the repulsion far too great to be in contact any longer. Searching the other’s face for a sign, a quiet plea escaped from him.

“Please.”

Now, because Jooheon’s effect on Changkyun was rather the opposite of Changkyun’s on Jooheon’s, Changkyun felt their connection as north and south. To him, it was the action of staying apart at this proximity that slowly killed him without killing him. Two opposite poles cannot leave space in between them.

And so, the moment Jooheon stepped away, Changkyun mirrored his movement almost instantaneously. With arms wrapping around Jooheon’s waist, Changkyun pulled him closer until the two were flush against against each other. He sighed with deliverance, pausing as he stared into the burning embers of Jooheon’s eyes before going in.

Changkyun’s kiss was slow, deliberate, a prayer reverently uttered by the last believer of the heavens. He spent an eternity and then an eternity more. The universe died, was born again, and again. Time was irrelevant to gods. Trillions upon trillions of souls passed through without knowing of love, or of love’s pain. And what of it, when their very incarnations were being blessed during their mortal lives?

When Changkyun let go, Jooheon exploded into a brilliant array of stars, each taking solitude to the farthest reaches of the galaxy, each burning ruby red.

Changkyun wistfully stared at the skies, finally at peace.

 

Jooheon would be back.

 

Jooheon would always be back.

**Author's Note:**

> ok but how does one write angst without feeling like a pretentious piece of shit.
> 
> but anyways ty for reading, u are a trooper.


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